You may have noticed that there has been a steep and steady and decline in the number of people who see each post that you make on your Facebook Page in the past year.
This decline is mainly due to the fact that there has been a 50% increase in the number of pages that people like in the past year. Why does this effect how many pages people see? The issue here is that Facebook has a newsfeed filter which controls what you see when you login to your account. They do this so that your newsfeed is a manageable size and so that you can see a kind of highlights of what has been posted to Facebook.
The Algorithm which decides this is unofficially called EdgeRank, uses several factors to determine which posts get served to who and for how long. See my other blog post about EdgeRank factors here. The reason Facebook does this is to provide each user with a manageable feed of posts which they can read when they login. The alternative is to leave a truly live feed, which is what you see when you login to Twitter. On Twitter you need to manually filter your feed to make sense of everything by either using hash-tags or twitter search to find topic or conversations which interest you. Some would argue that this makes the learning curve to use Twitter much more difficult, which might explain why take up of Twitter has been a lot slower then Facebook.
So the problem businesses are faced with is due to increased competition for a finite space, as more and more companies get onto Facebook and get their pages liked by people, the more marketing noise that gets generated, so Facebook filters the posts.
A recent study from EdgeRank Checker shows the decline in organic reach:
The drop in the last year alone from 17% to 6% is really quite alarming. For this reason it is really important to post relevant and engaging content to your Facebook page as part of a coherent Facebook strategy. Posting once a month about something that is barely relevant to your business (which is the typical DIY social media campaign) is even more counter productive then it was before.
